Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Watch: Sansar's First Live Music Performance by Avatars

Unless we missed a previous performance, it happened last night at a Halloween party featuring Oblee, who describes his style as "House Music On Millennium Falcon" (which I guess is one way to describe neo-lounge smooth jazz), performing for some 12-20 avatars on a floating platform in purgatory.

Early pioneering days to be sure, but the lack of avatar gestures, let alone dancing, is kinda painful to watch. According to the Sansar Newsblog, Oblee simultaneously streamed the performance into Second Life, and it'll be interesting to watch how live music experiences in Sansar evolve by comparison. Live music in SL has always been a tacked-on, cobbled together affair, and it would be great to see Linden Lab add some default tools -- fully-integrated tip jars, for starters -- to make it better.

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I am waiting/preparing for the moment when avatars in immersive social VR can dynamically play in-world instruments live and in real-time...The instruments themselves would exclusively respond to the virtual avatar players, the virtual environment and maybe even the virtual avatar audience... In other words, no streaming in from RL..In this streaming scenario we see in the video, the performer is performing from outside of a virtual world but broadcasting into it, not really directly in Sansar. I think the tech for exclusively in-world music performance is already there in places like High Fidelity and VR Chat (maybe even in Sansar)....There would be latency issues due to a networked avatar performance but I have seen some people collaborate sonically in places like VR Chat and the latency is not as severe as one might thing...One would have to compose music to account for whatever expected latency is there though.

I have been talking with friends for at least a year about forming an in-world punk band...One with weird abstract instruments but with the same energy as a punk band...These instruments would feedback in real-time and be in-world gesture controlled...So, punk-like but not an imitation of RL punk bands (sound-wise)...So, a band with live punk-like in-world performance energy but aesthetically closer to a true cyberpunk aesthetic (I do not mean industrial music)...If anyone would like to help form a band with me in any of these social VR worlds, that would be awesome...I have been part of an in-world music band called The Gates with Alberto Guedea Zamora back in 2002 (we used Digitalspace Traveler)...We want to keep this live in-world performance spirit alive...For my part, I would like to play the portals (they would feedback and teleport objects around while playing tones, of course) :-) Singing at the same time would also be a good idea...